


this sinking ship

by sassycatpants



Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Cultural Differences, Cultural Misunderstandings, F/M, Multi, Other, human/mer friendships, mentions of past death both oc and canon, mermaid au, terrible coping mechanisms for loss
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-01
Updated: 2017-12-02
Packaged: 2019-01-23 01:01:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12494896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sassycatpants/pseuds/sassycatpants
Summary: The quickest route between two points isn't always the straightest, and the path healing takes is never painless.





	1. Chapter 1

_Blood in the water, hands holding all three of them down on the rough wooden boards and she thrashes, powerful tail smacking the legs from under one human before there's burning agony searing a path down her face_

_she hears Gasket's screech of fury beneath the rush of blood pounding in her audial fins_

_Alternator's keening as Gasket's furious voice stops abruptly, something pulling taut and **snapping** inside her chest_

_they're laughing, they're laughing they're **l a u g h i n g**_

_she lashed out with claws and the sound of flesh tearing under them is oh so satisfying before she's shoved back into the bloody sea to the sound of men yelling, listens to the sound of the motor fading in the distance._

_She's drowning in agony and choking on her own blood but she dives frantically, chasing her trinemates down to the seafloor. They don't answer her calls and her chest feels **so empty**_

* * *

Sparkplug wakes without warning, lashing out at the warm bodies she can feel surrounding her even before she opens her eyes; there's sand under her hands as the mer drags herself away from the reaching hands with a snarl and flash of serrated fangs. One of the humans approaches hands held in front of him and in a move that's lightning fast despite the crumbling sands beneath her, Sparkplug closes her mouth around a pair of fingers before he can jerk his hands away.

She hears a yell as copper fills her mouth, flesh tearing as the fingers are ripped away from her teeth. She spits the liquid to the sand and snarls once more.

Unexpected pain explodes along the back of her head, and she falls into blackness.

********

Optimus curses under his breath as the injured mer crumples under the blow to the back of her head from Prowl. Not the way he'd have done it and certainly something Prowl would be lectured for when they got her to Ratchet, but her injuries are severe enough that she needs medical attention and she'd been in no condition to listen to soothing words. Chances are, with the very obvious knife wound, she's been wounded by humans and had considered his approach to be a threat.

He doesn't hold the bite against her anymore than he'd hold it against a frightened dog -- not that she is a simple animal, but the principle is the same. She'd been trying to defend herself, and can't be held accountable. Wrapping his hand in his jacket tightly, Optimus curses quietly once more before turning his attention to Prowl.

"Can you call Ratchet and let him know we'll be bringing him an injured mer? And, ah... Probably best to warn him of her violent temper at the moment, and a need for sedation." He pauses, glancing down at his hand. "And I suppose see if he can fix up my hand." He hears Prowl sigh at the use of ' _we_ ' and feels bad for only a moment -- Prowl's seasickness would make the other man completely miserable the entire trip to Ratchet's island, but Optimus doubts he'll be able to handle the mer alone with his hand injured as it is. They don't have much choice, really.

Prowl steps aside to make the call and Optimus crouches to study the young mer. A missing head fin -- ornamentation, probably, based on her species -- likely hacked off while she fought based on the direction and depth of the slice cutting through her face and the tears in the remaining bits of fin. It's a shame too; she'd likely been quite pretty before the trophy hunters had gotten to her. Likely why they had even targeted her, unfortunately.

Rodimus would probably like her, Optimus decides as his partner's voice goes silent. Hopefully the male mer could work his charm on her.

"Ratchet is waiting for us."

"Thank you Prowl." Between the two of them, they manage to get her into Optimus' boat and the tub he keeps for rescues like this with minimal discomfort, and he winces as he rubs his hands afterward. Definitely a shark, with scales are rough as hers had been. The boat shudders under his feet as Prowl starts it, and they leave shore behind quickly.

The mer doesn't wake.

  ********

Sparkplug wakes to unfamiliar waters, lifeless currents she doesn't recognize swirling around her. She hates it immediately as memories return, body feeling sluggish and oddly unresponsive. Humans. They must have captured her, brought her somewhere while she'd been unconscious.

As if confirming the thought, she hears voices above the waterline, and dives further towards the waterbed. They can't reach her down there, not without luring her out, and Sparkplug won't be fooled so easily a second time. Not when the first lure had led to -- the thought stutters out and she shoves it away violently, recoiling from blood soaked memories. Instead, she sets to learning the unfamiliar environment with an eye towards escape; she won't be their prisoner for long, and every moment she _is_ , she intends to make difficult.

There are no exits, the mer determines eventually -- or rather, the only exits she can find are barred gates between the pool she's in and a series of connected ones. Gates she does not yet know how to unlock. Sparkplug fiddles with one for a bit, but gives up quickly when it becomes obvious this is a human device she doesn't understand yet. But it presents  _opportunity_ , one she can come back to later. The humans are still there, watching her from behind a strange clear wall so she sneers at them from the safety of the deep. The tallest one -- the one she'd bitten, based on the way his fingers have been wrapped in something white -- bares his teeth back at her in a threat display she wasn't aware humans even  _knew_ how to make until --

 _They'd bared their teeth too but she hadn't recognized it for what it was, more interested in the object --_ She shoves the memory away again, stuffing it down into the darkness where it can't fill her mind. Sparkplug doesn't  _want_ to remember that. Not yet. Not  _here_ , in a human prison surrounded by them. She flips around in the water, and with a flick of her tail vanishes into the darkness of the pool.

****

"Well, I don't think she'll be coming into sight again any time soon," Ratchet says eventually. The mer -- he doesn't know her name, not yet -- had vanished into the depths of the specially built pool, most likely to lurk within one of the artificial caves until she felt safe enough to come out again. "We might as well go to the office and fill out the paperwork for her. Rodimus will let someone know when she comes out again. She's probably watching us. If she was injured by trophy hunters like you think, she'll probably wait until we leave to come back up." He paused, shooting a look at Optimus. "And you! Smiling like that, you daft idiot. That was a  _threat_ , and you don't do that in my Center, Optimus. Not to a mer already injured."

Optimus' unrepentant shrug makes him scowl as he turns on his heel to lead him and Prowl out of the room.

* * *

The two humans leave that evening, and Sparkplug watches them go. She still doesn't return to the surface for two days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Watch the tags and the story warnings as the story continues; right now I'm choosing not to use any of the official ones, and there's none in the tags past mentions of characters who died offscreen because none of them apply _yet_ , but there's a semi-decent chance of that changing further down the road. So if warnings crop up in the future, please heed them. It's probably going to be fairly light hearted ridiculousness and chaotic fun because that's the kind of thing I write best, especially when Sparkplug -- as I roleplay her on tumblr, long after all of her most self-defining losses have occurred-- is the muse I'm working with, but the underlying theme is _still_ the journey of healing from loss and grief so things won't always be fun.


	2. Chapter 2

The mer’s staring at him, and it’s making his shoulders itch. At first he isn’t sure what she wants, until he follows her gaze to the tuna sandwich that he’d forgotten about when he’d gotten caught up in his paperwork.

She’s hungry. He bites back the urge to smile; food always brings even the most reluctant of mers to the surface in his clinic, so he’s not that surprised it has worked on this one too. Ratchet climbs to his feet and heads to get a bucket of fish, hoping that what he has on hand will be good enough. He hasn’t been able to speak with her yet, and Rodimus had reported that she’d stayed below the last two days so he hadn’t spoken to her yet either. Neither of them have been able to determine if she has any special dietary needs as a result.

When he returns with the bucket, the mer is actually floating just above the water line instead of lurking just below.

He makes the mistake of getting too close.

Sparkplug strikes the moment the human approaches with the bucket full of fish; claws attach onto the skin covering that humans use and tug sharply. There’s a splash that covers the sound of his voice, and the mer latches onto his arms proper with an iron grip and drags him downward -- she feels him struggle in her hold and digs claws a little deeper to keep him. Revenge is sweet on her tongue even as he kicks her in the tail. She isn’t letting go, not when she’s finally getting a taste of the revenge she's craved.

And then a streak of red and gold slams into her, and Sparkplug shrieks in surprise as the human is torn from her grasp and shoved back to the surface.

The streak of color turns out to be another mer: male, and defiant in the face of her fury. Sparkplug throws herself at the interfering male, slashing angrily at him as he darts around in the water, fins flared in a calculated attempt to make himself look bigger. She’s never met him before, but she hates him already for saving the worthless landwalker. With her prey now out of reach again and unlikely to return any time soon, she focuses all of her anger on the stranger. He flares his fins at her once again, almost daring her to attack him and with another furious shriek she dives at him. He laughs as he dodges her slashing claws and stumbling attempts to grab flicking fins, whirling through the water like a dancer with every strike she fails to make.

"My name's Rodimus," he trills as she's chasing him through the pool. "What's your name?" Another dive into deeper waters, and Sparkplug chases him towards the bottom of her prison, reaching for his tailfin. It flicks just out of reach of her fingers, and she snarls and whips around instead to throw herself away from him and towards the surface and the glass walls around them. If she can't catch him, then she'll make him catch her. As expected, he takes the bait, repeating his questions.

"Sparkplug," she hisses eventually, just to shut up him. She doesn't want to be friends with him, why is he trying? Doesn't he realize she's _hunting_ him now? Apparently not, because he tries to corner her, and she smirks as she turns the chase back on him once again, pinning him to the clear wall of the pool. "Now I have you!"

He tilts his head at her curiously. "Yeah? What're you gonna do with me, then?" And then he _winks_ , and she splutters in surprise. What? **What**? What is he _doing_?

********

Ratchet scrambles out of the pool the moment he breaks the surface, and feels his throat burn as he spits up water.

 _Foolish!_ he berates himself, wringing his shirt dry. _Optimus told you the mer was violent when they found her, and she's been traumatized by humans! You should have known better!_ He can't believe he was stupid enough to get within grabbing range of a mer he'd _known_ was hostile towards humans; thank Primus for Rodimus and his quick thinking. He shudders to think what would have happened had the male mer not been inside at that exact moment, or if he had acted slower than he had.

He could have been dead on the bottom of the pool before he could get free of the mer's hold.

He can't let anyone else treat her, Ratchet realizes slowly. Having tried once, she was likely to try again. No; until he's made sure that she wasn't going to try and kill anyone who got within range of her hands, Ratchet is going to have to restrict his staff from even speaking to her. He'd heard her voice during his desperate struggle towards the surface; a voice as sweet as hers had been will have no trouble sweet talking poor First Aid into coming closer or releasing her into the public pools. He can't just send her back to the sea, either. She is definitely a human killer, and that is dangerous not only to humans but to herself as well. The coast guard would not hesitate to cull a mer deemed a threat to human swimmers or small boats.

If he can't change her perception of humans as enemies and prey, she'd be dead within weeks if he did release her back into the Rust Sea after treatment.

Splashing drags his attention back to the pool as Rodimus _plays_ with the other mer. He scowls; does the fool boy have no idea what sort of danger he's courting by irritating her?

********

Rodimus laughs quietly to himself as he flares his fins once more, like a cape to an angry bull, rolling over himself in the water in front of Sparkplug before he's finally caught-- _such_ a cute name. And she _was_ cute, if one didn't mind near incoherent rage and mindless murder attempts. But he'd figured early on that she's just angry at the stolen prey, and his hunch proved right as his flirting stops her in her tracks, leaving behind a confused mer. She's still angry -- oh, she's _so_ angry, he can nearly _taste_ it in the currents around her -- but she's confused and thinking a little more clearly now than she had been when she'd been chasing him across the water. Now that she's no longer chasing him, he can appreciate her looks a bit more.

Between her sleek curves, dark colors and streamlined figure it's obvious that Sparkplug's built to be a predator despite her small stature, and he finds the danger she exudes rather alluring.

Sparkplug scowls at the mer she'd cornered, trying to figure out what exactly his angle was. So far he's done nothing but taunt and tease her, daring her to chase him across the space she had access to, but no actual retaliation. And he'd saved the human. That she doesn't understand.

"Why did you save him?" she demands, ending their... game? It seems like a game, like he's been playing with her. Sparkplug doesn't know how to feel about that realization. "He's a human."

"He's never hurt you," Rodimus replies gently. "He treated your injuries when you were brought in." He watches the sneering confusion for a moment, the way she tries to fit this into her worldview after she's been hurt by humans. It's true that she doesn't hurt anymore, and that her injuries have been cared for. But it's also true that she genuinely doesn't trust Ratchet, it's clear just from watching her. The way her eyes dart towards the surface or the glass that separates them from the room. How she never turns her back to where she can see Ratchet.

It's almost sad, Rodimus think quietly. How she's been so hurt by humans in her one encounter that even when one offers her genuine kindness, she can't bring herself to trust it.

********

Ratchet can recognize when his presence is doing more harm than good, even when he can't understand the words being spoken, and it doesn't take much for it to become obvious that whatever the two are discussing between them, he is not welcome. He slips out of the room to leave them to their conversation, going to find his staff instead. They need to be made aware of the mer's unpredictable nature and that she's to be left alone. Ambulon is easy enough to find -- lurking in the back office where he always is, filing paperwork and handling the phone lines. Ratchet gets a dry look when he's reminded to stay away from the pools for now, as if he ever goes there anyway.

First Aid is a little harder to convince, his natural empathy and moral compass urges him to argue for a chance to help, but Rachet stands form and he gives in eventually. He won't interact with the newest resident of their clinic, and he won't allow her to sweet talk him into granting her access to the other pools. 

Pharma, though.

Pharma argues, more for the sake of arguing than any actual want to see the mer. His speciality is wildlife, not mers, but if Ratchet is going to forbid him from doing something then he'll want to do it to spite the doctor. Fortunately, Pharma has better things to do and his own patients to deal with and one single mer really is no consequence to the surgeon. Despite the initial argument, it takes Ratchet far less time and effort than he expects to convince his colleague to leave the mer to her own devices.

Task done, he returns to the pool to check in on the residents. He's surprised to find Rodimus lounging in his own pool and the female nowhere to be found.

"Did you get a name?" he asks after a moment of staring, shaking himself back into awareness. Rodimus laughs, hanging himself over the edge of his glass with a cheerful grin. His fins flick lightly in his amusement, tail swishing gently through the water to keep him stable in his chosen position.

"Yeah! Sparkplug. She's cute."

"Rodimus, she tried to kill me."

"Well, yeah. She thinks humans are all murdering bastards." Rodimus doesn't seem particularly worried about Ratchet's fate though, so the medic suspects Rodimus has, at the very least, talked her into not trying to so _obviously_ kill him. He probably feels confident he could protect Ratchet as well. Not that Ratchet is going to get into range and need protecting again any time soon. He'll just have to keep an eye out for any of her more subtle murder attempts.

The medic sighs and settles into a chair. "Alright. And did you find out anything else?" He's hoping for anything useful, including overlooked injuries or medical problems he can heal. Rodimus frowns for a moment, tail slowing in the water as he thought back on his encounter with the currently missing mer -- which reminds Ratchet to lean over and engage the electronic locks on the pool gates. More for Rodimus own protection than anything else, and he sees the mer frown slightly as they hear the locks click.

"She's hurting," Rodimus says finally. "There was a trine bond -- her trine was killed by humans before OP brought her in. I guess it was pretty traumatic, so she's grieving on top of the physical trauma."

Ratchet frowns at the unfamiliar word, cocking his head in a gesture for Rodimus to continue. He'll ask him about the clear mer-term later, once he's gotten everything else he needs. Rodimus makes a gesture towards the seemingly empty pool with a shrug. "Try not to be upset with her? She's scared and angry, thinks she has to protect herself. Um. Her injuries were definitely human made though. Trophy hunters, from what I got out of her -- they took the ornamental headfins she had." He pauses, frowning harder. "Don't try to lure her out, either. Wait for her to come to you on her own and stuff, 'cause the humans who hurt her lured her out as a trick and that's what got her and her trine caught. If you lure her she'll just think you're trying to hurt her too."

Ratchet doesn't need Rodimus to tell him just how bad an idea it would be for him to remind her of the humans who'd hurt her, either. He can see the results of their work just by looking at her, and it's not something he wants her to expect him to do as well. He's a medic, not a butcher. He sighs, leaning back in the chair.

"Alright. Stay away from her pool, Roddy. There's no telling what she'll do to you right now, when she's like this. I've already informed the rest of the staff to remain out of her range as well, I don't want them interacting with her. And keep Swerve away will you? The fool mer is liable to get himself mauled, trying to make friends when she clearly doesn't want them right now." Ratchet watches as Rodimus' face goes through an interesting mix of emotions in response to the order, before finally settling into uncertainty.

"Not letting her swim with other mers might make her worse instead of better. She's a shark, and their kind doesn't do so well in isolation, Ratch." Rodimus picks at a scale on his arm nervously, avoiding his eyes. "Shark mers are social creature, they bond for life in trines when they're still real young, and then spend their entire lives surrounded by others. Stories say they go mad if they're left alone too long. And I can take care of myself. Keeping Swerve away's a good idea, sure but I'm bigger than she is, so I could stop her if I had to." He looks up to catch Ratchet's eye, determined. "Leaving her alone like that feels  _wrong_ , Ratchet."

The doctor scowls for a long moment before he sighs. Rodimus' argument is logical and he isn't wrong about being larger and able to handle himself if needed. "Alright," he gives in, looking aggravated even as he does so. "I want to wait a week or two for her wounds to heal properly first. You can chat with her across pools until then. And once she's healed to my satisfaction, you can share her pool  _with supervision_ , for a few hours a day. If she shows improvement, then we can increase the time. If she continues to improve after that, we'll move her into your pool and allow access the outdoor communal. Sound fair?"

"Sounds great, Ratch! Don't worry, it'll be fine! You'll see, she'll be good." With a splash, the mer dove away, presumably to share the news through the locked gate with Sparkplug -- who was still out of sight.

"I hope I don't regret this," Ratchet muttered, dragging a hand down his face. A futile hope, he was certain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Most of November was, in the end, not spent writing lmao. That said, I am chugging along with this a bit. It comes in bits and pieces so wait between chapters is still unpredictable but... [vague gesture]


End file.
